National Constitution Center

Richard R. Beeman

On July 4 of this year the National Constitution Center (NCC), a high-tech, interactive museum devoted to the history, principles, and practices of American citizenship, opened its doors on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. The museum was a long time in the making, with antecedents dating back as far as 1886 when the governors of the states comprising the thirteen original colonies, in anticipation of the centennial of the Constitution, called for the creation of a "permanent memorial" in Philadelphia. As a Philadelphia-based historian who had watched the trials and tribulations of the Constitution Center during its early planning phases, it was with some wonderment that I watched as President Bill Clinton hosted ground-breaking ceremonies for the center on September 17, 2000. Even more impressive was the speed and efficiency with which the Constitution Center's President, former Rhodes Scholar Joe Torsella, Harry Cobb, the principal architect, and Ralph Appelbaum, the museum exhibit designer, moved the project from concept to reality.

But what is the Constitution Center meant to be and, more important, what can it become? These were the questions that were at the center of attention of the group of historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and jurists who constituted the Constitution Center's "Distinguished Scholars Advisory Panel" as we worked with museum exhibit designers in attempting to design a museum unlike any ever before created. This would be a museum devoted primarily to ideas, not artifacts, and one that sought to deal with those ideas in their full complexity.

The stated mission of the center was, from its very inception, to provide "neither an encyclopedic review of constitutional law nor a catalogue of rights nor an academic exercise in constitutionalism. Rather, the center, chartered by law to honor and explain the Constitution to ordinary Americans who live under it, does so by focusing on its most powerful words and its most crucial idea: the vision of popular sovereignty contained in the phrase &opensingle;We the People.'"

Not the least of the challenges we faced as we went about the task of creating exhibits consistent with this mission statement was that we had been warned by consultants, who had run focus groups with the middle-school-aged children who, with their parents, were to make up the "target audience" for the Center, that those young Americans most often reacted with instant revulsion to the very idea of being dragged by their teachers or parents to yet another "boring museum." We were also reminded that, however much Americans express reverence for the Constitution, they also display appalling ignorance about it. In a recent survey only six percent of adults were able to name the basic freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment and more teenagers were able to name the Three Stooges than the three branches of the federal government.

Closely related to the challenge of "audience" was the tension between creating an experience for visitors that would, appropriately, celebrate America's constitutional experiment and inspire an appreciation for the blessings of liberty facilitated by it, while at the same time maintaining a critical stance toward the nation's constitutional past. And, even more closely related to the tensions between celebration and inspiration on the one hand and a self-critical approach to civics education on the other, there were political minefields on every side of nearly every important issue in our history. In spite of an often imperfect understanding of the Constitution, most Americans have strong opinions about what it means and how it should be interpreted.

The solution to these challenges proved easier than many of us had anticipated. Our advisory panel, in addition to its disciplinary and professional diversity, was composed to include a wide range of ideological perspectives among its members. To give just one example, the three Supreme Court Justices serving on the Board were Stephen Breyer, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Antonin Scalia. More importantly, all of the members were committed to designing exhibits that centered around human stories--of presidents and Supreme Court justices and of ordinary citizens&emdash;whether they be newly-enfranchised male voters flocking to the polls to vote for Andrew Jackson for president, workers fighting for the right to organize, Japanese-Americans interned in World War II detention centers, or those many Americans who at various points in the past were denied the basic rights of citizenship. We were committed to a strategy which as much as possible allowed the historical participants to tell their stories in their own words.

The strategy of "teaching the conflicts" is widely used in education today, and it is vital to the interpretive mission of the Constitution Center. A central theme running throughout all of the exhibits is how difficult it has been to create a "more perfect union." Promoting the welfare and protecting the rights of "We the People," the exhibits suggest, was a task that began but certainly did not end with the Founding Fathers. By allowing most of the exhibits to be shaped by the words of the participants in our constitutional drama, we were able not only to avoid the trap of preaching a particular line of constitutional argument, but also to avoid the temptation to talk down to any of the museum's varied audiences. In this respect we were fortunate to be designing the Constitution Center at a time when other museums were using new technologies that enable visitors to explore issues at varying levels of complexity depending on their interest and existing levels of knowledge. Indeed, the Constitution Center was designed at a time when the very mission of museums was changing, when museums were becoming civic forums for community conversation and debate, where exhibits—be they artifact-based or otherwise—are seen as vehicles not only for "education," but also for civic engagement and debate.

These strategies become apparent as visitors begin their experience in the museum, sitting in a steeply-banked theater in the round in which, at the center, an actor in contemporary dress challenges the audience to consider the question: "What makes us Americans?" The multi-media presentation that follows attempts to introduce America's constitutional story in a way that is not only moving and inspirational, but also equally powerful in suggesting some of the ways in which we have sometimes failed to live up to the promise of a government devoted to serving "We the People."

From that initial, collective experience museum visitors proceed to a large circular gallery, stretching the equivalent of two city blocks, and confront a series of large story panels which chronicle America's constitutional history, from 1765 to the present. (The beginning point for the exhibits was a matter of debate among us, but we all agreed that it was important that the story of the American Revolution be linked to that of the Constitution. One of the consistent themes of the exhibits is the notion that much of the dynamic of America's history has been the challenge of bringing constitutional principles and practices into harmony with a more expansive conception of the promise of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.) The last section of this "chronology wall" gives way to a series of panels eliciting responses from visitors on present-day constitutional issues. The suggestion is that today's citizens, by adding their voices to the debate, will write the next chapters in the nation's constitutional history.

While the outer ring of the circular gallery invites the visitor to engage with America's history, the center ring is devoted to the basic workings of government, with interactive exhibits inviting visitors, for example, to sit at a replica of the Supreme Court bench, listen to arguments on an actual case, and render a decision. During my own initial tour of the museum, I was impressed by the ways in which these exhibits--which also allow visitors to cast votes for their favorite American presidents or to be videotaped, with a backdrop of the Capitol building behind them, taking the presidential oath of office--were spectacularly successful in engaging younger visitors. For better and for worse, the Constitution Center's large central gallery is not a quiet place; it is one in which there are multiple conversations--some of them animated ones--among visitors.

The task of initiating constitutional conversations has only begun. The center's Distinguished Scholars Advisory Panel will continue to advise museum officials on future programs that might occur in the auditorium and classroom spaces in the museum, as well as on partnerships with the media in creating programs featuring constitutional discussion and debate. And NCC, which already has created a website (<http://www.constitutioncenter.org>) to reach out beyond the physical space of the center itself, has an ambitious plan to improve and expand that site. Finally, the Constitution Center is about to launch a visiting scholars program with flexible terms of appointment. The reinvigoration of the museum's exhibits and interpretation by fresh scholarship is essential to its continued vitality, and I believe that the visiting scholars program is every bit as important as the high-tech exhibit designs.

During the period in which many of us were engaged in conceiving the exhibits for the museum, NCC President Joe Torsella confided that he consistently worried about two things. The first, not surprising given the intensity of the culture wars, was that the museum would become a lighting rod for criticism from either the left or the right--either for creating exhibits that were excessively celebratory or for devoting too much attention to incidents of injustice in our constitutional past. The second was that the museum would evoke no response at all, that visitors would leave unaffected by their engagement with our constitutional past and present. I am hardly an unbiased observer, but watching the enthusiasm of visitors during the week of the museum's opening, I came away believing that Torsella has nothing to worry about on either count. I hope, however, that members of the OAH will visit the museum themselves and form their own judgments about the ways in which the Constitution Center might enhance the public understanding of our nation's constitutional past. The center, like the Constitution, is still very much a work in progress.

Richard R. Beeman is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the visiting Harmsworth Professor of American History at The Queen's College at Oxford this academic year. Beeman served as cochair of the Distinguished Scholars Advisory Panel at the National Constitution Center.